Advertisers have long tried to make sure that the right people are watching their advertisements. Television advertisers spend large amounts of money trying to make sure their advertisements (“ads”) are aired during television shows having the proper demographics. Thus, television advertisers attempt to match the ad to the demographics of the audience for particular television programs, purchasing advertising slots for those television programs that they hope will attract the proper audience for their ads. Unfortunately, there is no way for the advertisers to know in real time whether people are watching their ads or whether the ads are reaching the targeted demographic groups. Similarly, there is no way for television advertisers to determine the viewing patterns of individual viewers or to target ads to individual viewers since the same ads are broadcast to everyone watching a particular program.
Advertisers on the Internet have been targeting their ads for several years. An Internet advertiser can currently register for an ad-serving service, which attempts to distribute the advertiser's ads to users who will be receptive to the ads. To view a web page on the Internet, a user enters the URL of the web page or clicks on a link to the web page. The web page itself is fetched from the appropriate web server, and an ad is fetched from the ad service. The ad service attempts to determine which ad to send to the user based on which web page the user has requested and on various other factors known about the user (such as, for example, information about the user gleaned from cookies or from user registration procedures). Because the ad service is located on the server side, the ad service generally relies on one-size-fits-all rules to determine which ads to display for a particular page request. Because the ad selection process is centrally located, performance requirements often necessitate a simplification of the logic used to select an ad.
In addition, an Internet ad service is “coupled” to the user request. An Internet ad server bases the ad it serves, at least partly, on the URL of the requested web page. It is also important to note that the Internet ad server needs to send an ad to the user as quickly as possible, because the user is expecting to receive the requested web page (along with any other third party content, such as ads) as soon as possible. The fact that the typical Internet ad server is time-constrained makes it more difficult for the ad server to perform elaborate methods to determine which ads to send. Overcoming this problem typically requires the use of very high-end computers to serve the ads.
Ultimately, Internet ad serving solutions are request-based. That is, an ad is served from the central server in response to a request. Because many requests are fulfilled in parallel, ads for competing products may be served for each of the separate requests. While in theory the server could track ads being served to each client and eliminate the serving of two competing ads to the same client, the centralized ad serving environment, with millions of users and with ad serving distributed over many actual servers, makes this extremely difficult.
Moreover, an Internet ad server needs to be in substantially constant communication with the Internet, since ad requests are received constantly. Such a system was not designed to work in situations where the ad receiving client is only intermittently connected to the Internet.
What is needed is a way to deliver ads to receptive audiences where there is ample time to determine who might be the best target for each particular ad and where the decision is sensitive to the context in which the ad request was made. Lastly, it is desirable to be able to place ads extremely quickly for each individual user.